Fifth Ave. Apartments Where the Gilded Age Never Tarnished

By JOHN TAURANAC

Published: September 23, 1999

HARDLY anyone is fully prepared for the first sight of some of the apartments at 828 Fifth Avenue, the former town house of Edward J. Berwind. They are, in a word, bedazzling. They rank among the grandest private spaces in New York City, comparable even with some of the city's great public spaces: the main reading room of the New York Public Library comes to mind.

Entering the apartments is like walking into a time machine. Unlike the failed contraption in a Woody Allen story, however, this is a time machine that works. With a willing suspension of disbelief, you're transported to another time and place, to the France of Louis XV or Napoleon or the Britain of William and Mary. ''It's about as grand as it gets in New York residences,'' said Michael Simon, the architect who is restoring the apartment that occupies the entire second floor.

Today, the house, on the southeast corner of 64th Street, consists of two floor-through apartments, two slightly smaller duplexes, and four more conventional-size apartments on the upper floors (the old servants' quarters). What is extraordinary about the house today is how many of the rooms have remained miraculously untouched in the two decades since it was converted into co-ops.

The house was built in 1896 for Berwind, a coal magnate, who, starting as an ensign in the United States Navy, wound up supplying coal not just to the Navy for its fleets but also to most of the railroads on the East Coast and the IRT subway trains. (Not coincidentally, Berwind served on the board of the IRT.)

The architect was the little-known Nathan Clark Mellen. If, as Le Corbusier maintained, a house is a machine for living, Mellen designed a machine for decorating. He created the structure and the facade and, that accomplished, he delivered it to the interior decorators so they could practice their legerdemain.

The paper trail on the original decorators is slim. Paul I. Miller, the curator of the Preservation Society of Newport County, R.I., said that the interior design was carried out by the French company Jules Allard & Son. The Allards were perfectionists. They understood not just style, but scale and proportion as well, and their fame in the United States at the turn of the last century rested in part on the work they had done for the architect Richard Morris Hunt at Marble House and the Breakers, in Newport. (Clearly, Berwind was pleased with the Allards' work: he also hired them to do the Elms, in Newport.)

The Berwind house was nothing less than a palace. There were ceremonial areas for receptions on the first two floors, with the family quarters safely sequestered on the third floor. A formal staircase greeted visitors as they entered from 64th Street. Off the landings, which played the role of grand foyers, were east and west wings stretching along the side street. The ground floor had three major rooms: a library and dining room in the east end and, overlooking Fifth Avenue from the building's bowed front, a formal reception room or picture gallery. The second floor essentially had only two rooms: a ballroom and a sitting room overlooking the park.

This is hardly ''4.5 rms, pk vu.'' Today's residents know what they have, and none have made renovations that are not true to the spirit of the place. No dropped ceilings, thank you very much.

The only major structural change occurred in 1945, when the central staircase was removed after the house was sold to the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences (for an estimated $300,000, which might buy one 15th of a full-floor apartment today). The house was sold by Julia Berwind, Edward's sister, who was the last person to occupy it as a single-family residence. (She was also one of the last Newporters who still had liveried footmen in the 1950's.) The institute used the house as its headquarters, then sold it to the American Heart Association. It was restored to residential use in 1978.

The most spectacular apartment is, predictably, the one that occupies the second floor, where the grandest reception rooms were usually built. Here, for example, was the ballroom.

''I've spent most of my career turning bland spaces into something grand,'' Mr. Simon said of the second-floor apartment, ''but this is the first time I've been presented with a space where everything was already in place and I was asked to restore it to its original grandeur.''

The apartment is about 3,500 square feet. Not including the kitchen, bathrooms and auxiliary rooms, which were carved out to make it self-contained, the space is basically a procession of three rooms that runs the 110-foot length of the house and, in two of them, its entire 35-foot depth. The ceilings are 18 feet high.

The story is that when Madonna was considering buying the apartment, she lay down on the floor of the former ballroom. For 15 minutes or so, she simply gazed upon the ceiling. (She didn't take the apartment, not because she didn't like it but because she couldn't reach a garage directly from the interior.)

It's no wonder she fell into a trance here. The style is unabashedly Louis XV and about as close to Versailles as residential New York has to offer. The room, with its abundant gilded trim and a pair of putti gesticulating from above the fireplace, is exactly as the Berwinds would have had it. In Vienna, they'd call it schlag.

The central room, once a reception hall, will be used by its present owners as the entrance hall and dining room. Its style is more Fontainebleau than Versailles, harking back to the cusp of Gothic and Renaissance. The walls, with their Renaissance-style trim, are coved as they slope up to meet the star-filled ceiling, which has clear roots in the Gothic ceiling of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris.

Against one wall is a monumental fireplace on which a pair of muscular atlantes strain valiantly to support the mantel. The sculptor was probably one of the 200 or so Allard artisans. Elaborate molding leads the eye to an escutcheon above the mantel, with the initials E J B, for Edward J. Berwind, worked into it. By a quirk of fate, they also happen to be the initials of new owners.

The oak-paneled sitting room of the Berwind era is now the bedroom. The room, in the style of the Regence, is almost dainty by contrast to the bacchanalian extravaganza of the center room. The main ceiling painting here is on canvas. This is not a restoration: it's brand new, fashioned in a style reminiscent of French ceilings of the first decades of the 18th century.

''It took 13 workers to get the canvas onto the ceiling from a scaffold that was five feet away,'' Mr. Simon said. ''It was one trick to get that in there.'' What wasn't painted on canvas was applied directly onto the ceiling as a mural. Adding to the complexity is the fact that the Fifth Avenue facade is bowed and the ceiling is coved, meaning there are curves in two directions.

One of the duplexes, which begins on the ground floor, is the domain of

Stephen Brighenti, a hotel developer, and his family. Like their neighbors, they were resolute in returning their apartment to its original state. For the mahogany-trimmed library, now the sitting room, the style is Empire (originally chosen as a foil for Berwind's robber-baronial collection of art and antiquities).

Although the Allards, pere et fils, were comfortable working in the Empire style, it's clear that they consulted the work of Pierre-Francois-Leonard Fontaine and Charles Percier, who designed Malmaison and were Napoleon's court architects. They wrote a stylebook of interior design to show the intricacies of the Empire style, and despite a disclaimer that they were by no means offering models for imitation, that, of course, is precisely what they succeeded in doing.

In the Berwind library, each of the eight pilasters is topped by a capital with a central winged figure flanked by floral motifs. The capital looks like one piece, but it's 20 separate pieces and is straight out of plate 62 of the Percier and Fontaine stylebook. The wood paneled walls are treated almost like furniture, with gilt-bronze mounts in the Empire style; the ceiling is a pale gray, with trim in Pompeian hues.

The Brighentis share the ground floor with the fashion designer Adolfo, who has the other duplex.

Adolfo's main floor includes the former picture gallery, now a sitting room, which is as spectacular as the Brighentis', but instead of the delicate Empire purity, the style here is English Baroque -- on a suitably baronial scale. Think scarlet and oak paneling. Lots of it. It covers the walls and is seen in the fluted columns and surrounding the doorways (where the oak motif is continued in decorative-plaster oak clusters). The floor is oak, as well. This is a fitting setting for Adolfo, among whose collections is a group of portraits of European nobles (quite comfortably ensconced here, it would seem).

In 1987, when Adolfo bought the apartment from the sociologist Shere Hite, he called on EverGreene Painting Studios in Manhattan, the company that has recently restored the ceiling mural in the Chrysler Building. EverGreene, like Jules Allard & Son, has a staff of artists, each specializing in different aspects of restoration. The restorers returned time and again, Adolfo said, to absorb the subtleties of the space before beginning work, and then they carried it out as carefully as they had studied it.

''Adolfo was my idea of an ideal client,'' said Jeffrey Greene, the president of EverGreene. Working on this house, he added, gave him a feeling of being in a direct line to his artistic forebears of a century ago.

That is a fact and feeling shared by the fortunate few who are resident at 828 Fifth Avenue.

Photos: IN MARBLED SPLENDOR -- Walls in the entrance hall/dining room in the second-floor apartment, left, are coved to meet the Gothic ceiling. WORTHY OF EMPIRE -- The walls in the Brighenti sitting room have gilt bronze from the stylebook of Napoleon's architects. THEIR OWN PRIVATE VERSAILLES -- The gold-trimmed ballroom of the Berwind era, left, is now a sitting room. Below, the apartment's Regence bedroom, with park views. (Photographs by Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)(pg. F8); ROBBER BARONIAL -- The 1896 Berwind mansion, inset, is home to Adolfo, above, who occupies a duplex. His sitting room, left, once the painting gallery, is an explosion of English Baroque. (Photographs by Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)(pg. F1)

John Tauranac, an architectural historian, is the author of ''The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark'' (Scribner).